You can read it in the words. You can see it in the eyes. You can sense it in the buildings, still humming with life and energy and hope even in the depths of a lost basketball winter.

We love baseball in New York City. Football? Football fuels us, especially when the Giants or the Jets are on a roll. And, yeah, we can already taste what Islanders-Rangers would be like, if we get that come April or May.

But New York City lives basketball. Lives it. Still. Forty-two years after the last NBA championship, 39 since we ruled the ABA. Even as we still await the first collegiate champion. Even as too many nights are spent looking longingly at other teams, other towns, wondering when one of those teams are coming to this town.

“I’ve seen the way Indiana loves its basketball,” Lou Carnesecca told me not long ago, as we watched layup lines before a St. John’s game at Madison Square Garden, as the old coach began to twitch with the familiar anticipation of another game and another gym. “I’ve seen how Kentucky loves basketball. It’s a great game. Everybody should love basketball.”

Looie smiled that big smile then, and with that voice landscaped by so many games at Alumni Hall and the Garden and Nassau Coliseum, going all the way back to St. Anne’s before St. Anne’s became Archbishop Molloy, so many camps and so many clinics, he said, “But here, the game is king. King!”

Fomer St. John’s coach Lou Cannesecca, in 2004Kevin Coughlin

Sometimes, let’s be honest, it can seem like we’re talking ourselves into that now. The Knicks have had one memorable season in the last 15. The Nets have scuffled since moving to Brooklyn, some high notes, more sour patches. The Johnnies have played two NCAA Tournament games in the new century, lost both. There are fewer and fewer can’t-miss prospects coming out of the city’s public and parochial leagues.

All true. All a matter of record.

It is still a game fluoridating the city’s bloodstream, fastened to its heart. The words of the late Pete Axthelm, written 45 years ago, still apply:

“Basketball,” he wrote, “is the city game … to the uninitiated, the patterns may seem fleeting, elusive, even confusing; but on a city playground, a classic play is frozen in the minds of those who see it — a moment of order and achievement in a turbulent, frustrating existence.”

No other city has the Original Celtics as part of its basketball soul, the first super-team put together long before LeBron James ever met Dwyane Wade — Nat Holman and Joe Lapchick and John (the Horse) Haggerty. No other city has the New York Rens as a part of its essential basketball fabric, the all-black team based out of the Renaissance Casino and Ballroom on 138th Street and Seventh Avenue but who mostly barnstormed the country in the ’20s and ’30s and won five out of every six games it ever played thanks to Clarence (Fats) Jenkins and Charles (Tarzan) Cooper and Wee Willie Smith, among so many others.

(And it’s right to point out here that the Globetrotters — won-loss record at last count: 22,000-345 — may have been born in Chicago’s Savoy Ballroom but quickly opted to adopt Harlem as their nominal home.)

No other city ever had a basketball time like New York and the 1970s, when we not only had the Hit-The-Open-Man Knicks thrilling the game’s purists in winning two NBA titles but also a glimpse of what was to come — Julius Erving introducing us to the above-the-rim game of tomorrow, leading the Nets to two ABA titles.

We have long been the home office for playground fables in the real-life adventures of Earl (the Goat) Manigault and Herman (the Helicopter) Knowings and James (Fly) Williams, who left Brownsville for a brief stay at Austin Peay State and inspired the greatest chant in the sport’s history while he was there: “The Fly is Open, Let’s Go Peay!”

There may never have been a better high school player than Connie Hawkins, Boys High Class of 1960, unless you consider the way Dwayne (Pearl) Washington captured the city’s imagination 23 years later, after the school was renamed Boys and Girls … unless you consider that Lew Alcindor, Power Memorial Class of ’65, also prepped here. And so did Chris Mullin (Xaverian ’81) and Kenny Anderson (Molloy, ’89) and the Fort Hamilton brothers King (Bernard ’74 and Albert ’77).

And, really, we could go on a good while longer.

That’s who we are. That’s what we are, have been, so badly covet, so badly want again. The Knicks still sell every seat, despite their woes. Brooklyn desperately wants a reason to fall hard for the Nets. The Johnnies win a few games in a row, and that’s all it takes to get people talking about them. St. Francis in Brooklyn Heights has it working. Every now and again Manhattan does. Fordham has Rose Hill, a throwback’s throwback of a barnyard fieldhouse …